A Theory About the Decline of American Civilization February 16, 2013

Tolstoy said that “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

I wonder if that’s true of failed civilizations, too. That is, it seems like all free countries should look similar, because their people are free, but every great civilization that has collapsed, turned to anarchy or tyranny, has done so in its own unique way. Because there is an infinite variety of ways government can encroach on the people and an infinite variety of ways a free society can turn into an unfree one.

I’ve been considering how Russia was a great nation, and then the Soviet “experiment” happened for 70 years and turned the place into a totalitarian nightmare of suffering. Iran has been a great nation several times in its history, and is currently in its own “experiment” phase. Iranian totalitarianism has some features in common with Soviet totalitarianism – just like in China, or Cuba, or North Korea – but each country has its own version of totalitarian nightmarishness, and each got there in different ways.

So what I’m saying is, America may well be on the fast track to decline and awfulness, but that doesn’t mean we can predict how we’ll get there based on past experience in other countries because we’ll find our own, unique way.

A propos of nothing, I was curious what I’d get if I googled “robot giraffe,” and here’s one part of the answer:

A vision of the future

That interesting thing was made by Andrew Chase. Would it freak you out to know that thing moves? Because it does.

In the beginning of some book, maybe an older Clancy novel, he talks about the innate suffering of the Russians. That when you count all the deaths from WWI, the revolution, Stalin and then WWII, perhaps as many as 80 million died. That it affected every family, horrible suffering for 40 years.